Monday, August 27, 2012

character: between representation and cause

Character, unlike the soul, or the person, or the self, has
never settled its ontological accounts, so that it can be said to exist in the
“world” or in the “representation of the world”.

Seventeenth
century character books were written in the shadow of the ut pictura poesis –
which gains its legitimacy not just in the tradition of the humors, but in the
tradition of the portrait. Plutarch, at the beginning of his life of Alexander,
makes the association between the picture and the character explicit:

“For
it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most
illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a
slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of
character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or
sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in
their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the
character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the
body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the
soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to
others the description of their great contests.” [B. Perrin, translation]

The association of the character with the sketch, the
picture and the mask pulls the concept into the domain of representation, and
it is here that “Alexander” can become a character in an anecdote or a life.
The association of character with expression, with what is under the surface,
with virtue and vice, pulls it into the domain of the self, the person, the
soul – and, most importantly, of cause. It is here that character can impose
itself in history, for it is not simply the character Alexander, but the
character of Alexander, that is exposed in his Life. In the first association
of character we can see the roots of the notion of alienation – an imprisonment
in obsessions, routines, repetitions, humors. Self-representation, then, does
have a causal status in as much as it causesothers to act in a certain way to the imprisoned character, and the
prison grows more impenetrable as the character precedes to write itself into
this script. In the second, character is something outside of the prison,
something recognizing, something that stands, emblematically, before the good
and the bad, the act and the habit. In its second guise, character can be
‘acted upon’, trained. Character, here, is linked to education – in the
humanist tradition, in a text like Montaigne’s The ‘institution’ [education] of
children’, character is the central object of all teaching.

It is the conceptual fate of character that it should have
these two analytically distinct poles, and that historically, as they coalesce
in the semantic space of “character”, they bleed into one another.

The way character has come to straddle these realms of
being makes it hard to imagine (for an "us", a Westerner, a paleface, a member in good standing of the artificial paradise) a culture with a semantic table of fundamental
elements that wouldn’t have a word for, or a notion of, character.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.